Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,86

“fresh set of eyes.” Friel had worked with Snyder in the homicide division in 1984, when Deborah Wilson was killed, and although he didn’t work the case, he and Snyder talked about it often over the years; the college student’s murder still bothered him.

Friel knew what Snyder was feeling, especially toward the end of his career when he was running out of chances. “Bob Snyder is truly a legend in homicide, the consummate homicide detective,” Friel said. “But there are cases you can’t let go of.”

Walter was impressed as he appraised Snyder at the podium. It was an important step that one of the city’s finest detectives had asked for their help. When mobster Frankie Flowers was killed in the Mafia wars, Snyder was the shoe leather the department sent out to find the killer.

Walter felt bad for the hardworking cops, and also for Deborah. He knew how they stewed in a hard boil of grief and rage, haunted by an unanswerable question: Why? There was no rational reason; closure was impossible.

It’s time to out the bastard, he thought. That much I can do.

As Snyder discussed the crime scene, Walter sipped his black coffee and listened.

On the evening of Friday, November 29, 1984, Deborah was working late on a computer project in Randell Hall, a landmark campus building, the detective said. The ornate stone edifice, built in 1901, was a huge labyrinth of classrooms and offices famously difficult to navigate.

At 11 P.M., Deborah called her parents’ home across the river in New Jersey from a computer lab. She said she had to keep working to finish the assignment due the next morning. Gifted at mathematics, her major, Deborah struggled with other courses, including computer science. But she was a disciplined student who put in the long hours needed to excel. She didn’t have a boyfriend, though young men were interested in her, and didn’t smoke or drink. She had modeled and played clarinet in high school but focused on academics in college. Living at home with her parents and commuting to Drexel, she kept her eyes on the future. “She wanted to be an engineer,” her sister Suzanne Leis had said. “She was determined she could do it.” A photograph of a new Mercedes-Benz sedan hung on her bedroom wall as incentive.

Her parents often fretted about their open, trusting, somewhat naïve young daughter working late in the crime-ridden West Philadelphia neighborhood. But Deborah assured them the engineering building was safe, and when she was done she would get a security escort to her car.

Two and a half hours later, at 1:30 in the morning, Deborah called home again and told her parents she still needed another hour to complete the project, but they shouldn’t worry. Her ex-boyfriend, Kurt Rahner, was there with her in the computer room. He’d wait and walk her to her car.

But Rahner didn’t wait. He left the computer room shortly afterward. On his way home, he asked a campus security guard to make sure Deborah got safely to her car, and the guard passed word to campus guard David Dickson. Dickson patrolled the campus on the midnight-to-8 A.M. shift, and was responsible for the computer room.

A few minutes after 1:30 in the morning, Deborah was alone in the lab, working on the computer, when she was attacked. At 1:38 in the morning, computer records show, she made her “last transaction” on the computer. It seemed hurried as if “she was interrupted,” said Drexel computer administrator John J. Gould Jr. “It looked like she stopped in the middle of what she was doing.” Snyder had reconstructed the likely events. Her attacker apparently surprised her and beat her into submission, Snyder said. Then he strangled her to death with an electric extension cord; the cord was discarded near the computer, its grooves matching the marks on Deborah’s neck.

At three in the morning, when her parents hadn’t heard from her, they reassured themselves she was sleeping in the computer room while pulling an all-nighter. In fact, by three in the morning, according to the coroner, she was already dead. In the huge, dark, empty building, her killer carried or dragged her body through the maze of halls and through a door that led to a protected concrete stairwell on the outside of the building. At the bottom of the cold, quiet stairwell on the bitter winter night, he continued to savagely beat her corpse with two bricks, a yard-long piece of lumber, and a strip of metal. The three